Co-founder: Bustle

I am dedicated to innovating in a way that is user focused. I am captivated by human behaviour, mind and motivation and am always curious as to how research and understanding of this can be captured and fuelled into design. 

I am currently working with two fellow students, to launch our start-up: Bustle, a social media for actually being social. Bustle is a platform that facilitates simplicity of organising meet ups with friends and other likeminded people. A platform that we use to disrupt the toxic reality caused by previous social medias. Understanding the mechanisms used by other platforms that tap into psychological processes to make them addictive and consequently lead to loneliness, anxiety, extremist views, the list goes on (!). We use these same techniques with a spin for the good, creating a platform that makes healthy behaviours addictive, talking a societal issue at the level of an everyday pain reliever. 

In this venture I have adopted the Psychology Lead role. This project has been very much user focused and lead. We have revolved our process round gathering insights from users, through surveys, interviews, focus groups and co-design workshops. At each stage we gather information; we analyse it, drawing insights; discuss these insights, synthesize them, and then feedback to our users, delving deeper into specific areas we have identified, doing research on them to gain more substantial understanding. I have lead focus groups and co-design workshops. We focused heavily and worked hard on really understanding our personas and customer journeys. Our strategy and marketing revolve around gaining a community first that are passionate about why we are doing what we are doing for society, gathering their input and raising awareness at the same time. We aim to create a platform that is more organic for our users, with the implementation of our underpinning research and psychology. I have been largely involved with creating prototypes and making sure that the design of our mock-ups incorporates our insights and findings, translating insights into actionable features for a platform.  Keeping up to date with the community that we have formed, we want to keep in the know always staying relevant and creating products relevant for our users. 

We are currently looking for funding opportunities and are happy to talk further about this enterprise.